Category Archives: Systems

When Does a System Exist? The Myth of the Given System:

In today’s post, I want to look at a question that seems almost too simple to ask: when does a system exist? For this I will be drawing on ideas from Wilfrid Sellars, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heinz von Foerster, and Martin Heidegger.

We talk about “systems” all the time. The healthcare system. The education system. The traffic system. We speak as though these are objects sitting in the world, waiting to be observed, measured, and fixed.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Reach out your hand and try to touch the healthcare system. You can touch a hospital bed. You can hear a monitor beeping. You can speak to a nurse. You can shake a doctor’s hands. But where is the system? You cannot knock on it. You cannot hold it in your palm.

And yet we speak about it as if it were an object in front of us. We say things like “The system is broken” or “The system needs fixing.” The language gives it a kind of independent standing, as if it were a malfunctioning engine sitting somewhere, waiting for a repair technician.

This way of speaking rests on a hidden assumption, the assumption that there are structures in the world simply waiting to be perceived and described. The philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called this the “Myth of the Given”.

Wilfrid Sellars:

The “Myth of the Given” is the idea that the world presents itself to us in raw, pre-interpreted form. That before language, before concepts, before any act of distinction-making, there are simply facts delivered to the mind. Knowledge, on this view, is built upward from this unmediated foundation.

Sellars argued that this is a fallacy. He noted that sensing is not the same as knowing. A sensation may trigger a belief, but it does not justify one. Knowledge belongs to what he called the space of reasons. This is a shared space where claims can be offered, challenged, and revised.

He used the example of a tie shop clerk to make this point. Under the store’s electric lighting, the clerk says “This tie is blue.” Later, when another clerk points out the effect of the lighting, he revises his claim to “It looks blue.” The sensation itself has not changed. What has changed is his understanding of the norms governing correct description. There is no raw, unmediated given beneath our experience. There is already a learned practice of making and correcting distinctions.

This matters for how we talk about “systems”. When someone says “The system is broken,” that statement is not a neutral observation. It presupposes standards. It implies that something is failing relative to shared expectations. The claim invites agreement, disagreement, and justification. It is a normative claim, not a factual report.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Ludwig Wittgenstein made a related point in his reflections on rule-following and meaning. He asked whether meaning could be grounded in something purely private, such as an inner sensation. His answer was that it cannot. Without shared, public criteria for correctness, there would be no way to distinguish between actually following a rule and merely believing one is doing so.

Meaning lives in shared forms of life, not in private inner episodes. When we describe something as a system, we are not reporting a neutral fact. We are placing ourselves within a shared field of expectations and norms. The word “system” already carries commitments about what ought to be happening.

Heinz von Foerster:

Heinz von Foerster made a parallel observation about cognition. He pointed to what he called “undifferentiated encoding”. The interpretative framework does not encode categories like red or green directly. It encodes differences in stimulation. The differentiation into meaningful categories happens inside the organism itself.

This is due to what cybernetics calls “operational closure”. An entity responds according to its own structure, not according to instructions delivered from the outside. Von Foerster noted that the environment contains no information as such. Information arises only through the distinctions the organism is capable of making.

Sellars shows there is no raw knowledge. Wittgenstein shows there is no private anchor for meaning. Von Foerster shows there is no raw information. Each, in a different register, removes the idea of a pre-given foundation beneath our experience of the world.

But even together, they leave something unaddressed. Even if knowledge and information are constructed, we might still imagine ourselves as observers standing outside the world, organizing it from a neutral distance. This is where Martin Heidegger becomes essential.

Martin Heidegger:

Heidegger does not begin with perception or information. He begins with care.

For Heidegger, we do not encounter the world as neutral spectators. We are already involved. We are embedded in projects, concerns, and purposes. The world shows up in relation to what matters to us.

His example of the hammer is well known and I have written about it before. When you are skillfully hammering a nail, the hammer withdraws into the activity. It is ready-to-hand, transparent to your purpose. So is the nail, and the wood. None of them present themselves as objects. You are simply absorbed in the task.

The hammer only becomes visible as an object when something goes wrong. It breaks. It slips. It is missing. At that moment it becomes present-at-hand. You step back and look at it.

The object appears through breakdown.

The Myth of the Given System:

Now consider: what if systems work in exactly the same way?

You do not experience the healthcare system while care flows smoothly. You experience patients, conversations, treatments, and nurses. The coordination is ongoing and transparent. The practices are simply happening. Nobody says “the system.”

Now imagine a bed is unavailable. Or an insurance policy blocks a treatment. Or a drug is out of stock. Suddenly someone says: “The system is broken.”

Notice what has happened. A concern has been frustrated. And from that frustration, a boundary is drawn. A pattern of practices is gathered together and named. What was ready-to-hand, invisible in its smooth functioning, has become present-at-hand. The system has appeared.

The system is not given. It is disclosed through breakdown.

The traffic jam is another good illustration of this. Physically, there are cars and asphalt. But the system only appears relative to care. To the commuter, it is a failure of punctuality. To a vendor walking between the vehicles, it is an opportunity. To a city planner, it may be evidence of demand exceeding capacity. The cars are real. The asphalt is real. But the system is not the same kind of thing as the cars. It is a configuration that becomes visible when care encounters resistance.

To speak of the system as though it were an independently existing object, like the cars or the asphalt, is to extend the Myth of the Given into organizational life itself.

Once we see this, the ethical implications are hard to avoid. If systems arise through care, then system boundaries reflect what we care about. When we define healthcare in terms of efficiency, we foreground throughput. When we define it in terms of community wellbeing, we foreground relationships and continuity. Every articulation reveals some concerns and conceals others.

Second Order Cybernetics:

Second order cybernetics has always insisted on this point. The observer cannot be separated from the observed. When we define a system, we are not pointing at something that already existed independently of us. We are making a distinction. And as George Spencer-Brown noted, to draw a distinction is to create a world.

This is the shift that second order thinking invites. We do not ask “What is the system?”

but:

“What do I care about such that this shows up as a system at all?”

That is not a technical question. It is an existential one. Every system in this regard is a human system.

Final Words:

When we draw a boundary and call it the “system”, we are not pointing to a thing that exists independently of our distinctions. We are organizing experience around what matters to us. We chose to draw the boundary there, instead of here. We chose include that, instead of this. And we do so because our care was interrupted at that point, and not somewhere else.

This does not mean the consequences are unreal. When care is blocked, when treatment is denied, when livelihoods are threatened, when exhaustion becomes chronic, viability is genuinely at stake. To say that systems are articulated through concern is not to dismiss suffering. It is to take it more seriously.

If one’s care is endangered, one cannot remain in abstraction. Action then becomes necessary. But what kind of action?

If we treat the system as an external machine, we search for mechanical fixes. We adjust policies, change incentives, replace personnel. These may be necessary. Yet they often operate within the same set of distinctions that produced the difficulty in the first place.

Second order thinking asks a question in a deeper dimension. What distinctions are we relying on that make this outcome appear inevitable? What counts as success in this configuration? What has been excluded from the circle of relevance?

Instead of saying “The system is broken,” we might say “The current way we are coordinating our practices is undermining viability.” That wording does not place us outside the problem. It acknowledges participation without assigning simplistic blame.

Participation does not mean individual control. Many structures are vast and historically sedimented. But even within constraint, we contribute through compliance, resistance, redesign, conversation, refusal, and collaboration.

Ethics enters precisely here. Not as a moral add-on, but at the level of boundary drawing itself. Every time we define what the system is, we define what matters. Every time we measure performance, we privilege certain forms of viability over others.

Second order cybernetics does not provide a formula for what to do when care is threatened. It does not eliminate conflict between competing concerns. What it does is remove the illusion that responsibility lies elsewhere.

If viability is at risk, the task is not simply to repair an external object. It is to examine, collectively, how we are distinguishing, organizing, and sustaining the patterns that shape our shared world.

That work is slower. It is less dramatic. It requires conversation rather than diagnosis.

It keeps us inside the picture.

Stay Curious and Always keep on learning…

If you liked what you have read, please consider my book “Second Order Cybernetics,” available in hard copy and e book formats. https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book

Note:

In referencing the work of Martin Heidegger, I want to acknowledge the deeply troubling fact of his affiliation with the Nazi party. This aspect of his life casts a long and painful shadow over his legacy. While I draw on specific philosophical ideas that I find thought-provoking or useful, this is not an endorsement of the man or his actions. Engaging with his work requires ethical vigilance, and I remain mindful of the responsibility to not separate ideas from the broader context in which they were formed.

References:

  1. Heidegger, M. Being and Time (1927)
  2. Sellars, W. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956)
  3. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (1953)
  4. von Foerster, H. Understanding Understanding (2003)
  5. Spencer-Brown, G. Laws of Form (1969)

I Do Care, Don’t You?

In today’s post, I want to clarify what it means to care as a human being and why that clarification matters for how we think about “systems”. This is a continuation of my previous post, in which I clarify the notion of “care” from a Heideggerian and existential standpoint. I hope this provides further food for thought for system thinkers.

We often speak of care as if it were a choice, a sentiment, or a moral stance that one may adopt. However, if we examine our lived experience more closely, we discover that care is not optional and that it is not something we add to life from the outside. It is the structure through which life shows up for us as meaningful in the first place. To say that we care is not to say that we are kind or benevolent. It is to say that the world already matters to us before we decide that it does. This is not a psychological observation about emotions. It is a clarification of the existential structure within which any emotion, evaluation, or decision becomes possible.

Care as the Structure of Involvement:

We do not first encounter a neutral world and then assign value to selected parts of it. We are always already involved. We wake into concerns, obligations, projects, relationships, unfinished tasks, and implicit expectations that were operative before we began reflecting on them. Even indifference is directed toward something, and even withdrawal is a response to what has already failed to meet our concern. Our lives are therefore not collections of isolated objects but structured fields of relevance within which certain things stand out as significant and others recede into the background.

Let’s consider some simple examples to make this concrete. The floor can trip us, a comment can embarrass us, a machine can fail us, and a relationship can wound us. None of these events are neutral occurrences to which we later attach meaning. They strike us because they intersect with something that is already at stake. Care names this condition of being exposed to what matters, a condition in which our projects, identities, and possibilities can be supported or undermined.

Thrownness – Finding Ourselves Already In Progress:

This exposure is not chosen. Heidegger referred to it as thrownness. We find ourselves already in a world that is underway, shaped by histories, institutions, languages, and practices that we did not select. By the time we begin asking who we are, we have already been formed.

One way to grasp this condition is to imagine being placed under a spotlight on a stage where a play is already in progress. Other actors are speaking, the audience is present, and the plot has been unfolding long before we arrived. We have no script in hand, no rehearsal, and no complete understanding of the role we are expected to play, yet we cannot step off the stage or suspend the performance. We must respond within a scene whose conditions we did not author.

We are thrown into particular families, political orders, economic systems, and cultural expectations, and our responses both inherit and reshape what is already there. Care does not arise after this situation; it is what this situation feels like from within. It is the lived sense that something can go well or badly and that our participation matters.

Finitude and the Logic of Care:

Thrownness alone does not fully explain care. There is a deeper structural condition at work, namely our finitude. Our time is limited, our possibilities can close, opportunities can vanish, relationships can end, bodies can fail, and plans can collapse in ways that cannot always be reversed. The fact that our being is not guaranteed introduces weight into our decisions and seriousness into our commitments.

To clarify this, let’s imagine a being that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and immortal. Such a being could not be surprised, could not be overpowered, and could not ultimately lose anything irretrievably. No possibility would close permanently, no project would be exposed to final failure, and no decision would carry irreversible consequence. In such a condition, urgency would dissolve because everything could be deferred without cost. If nothing can be lost and no time limit constrains action, then nothing presses upon the being with genuine necessity.

Care belongs to creatures for whom something can go wrong and for whom time is not infinite. It emerges from exposure to loss, from the risk of non-being, and from the fragility of our projects. Finitude is not an unfortunate defect added to an otherwise complete existence; it is the condition that gives existence weight. We care because our possibilities are limited and because what we love, build, and pursue can be threatened or taken from us.

Anxiety and the Withdrawal of Meaning:

There are moments when the taken-for-granted coherence of our world loosens and the structures that normally guide us begin to feel uncertain. Projects that once seemed obvious lose their grip, and the background sense of stability that supports everyday action becomes less secure. This experience, often described as anxiety, does not simply signal fear of a specific object. It discloses the fragility of the meaningful framework within which our lives unfold.

 In such moments, we recognize that our projects rest on no final guarantee and that the systems we inhabit are sustained only through ongoing commitment and coordination among finite beings. Meaning is not fixed in advance; it must be enacted and maintained. Care becomes visible precisely because what matters can withdraw, because the ground beneath our projects can shift, and because we ourselves are not permanent fixtures in the scene.

The Structural Tendency Toward Forgetting:

Although anxiety can disclose our condition, we do not live in constant existential intensity. Most of the time, we are absorbed in routines and roles that allow coordination to function smoothly. We rely on procedures, metrics, categories, dashboards, and models that stabilize expectations and guide action. This absorption is not a flaw but a practical necessity for collective life.

However, there is a structural tendency toward forgetting embedded in this stabilization. The structures that were originally created to respond to particular concerns can begin to conceal their own contingency. A model that once addressed a specific risk can come to appear as the world itself. A procedure designed to manage uncertainty can harden into inevitability. The “system” can present itself as though it were independent of the concerns and vulnerabilities that gave rise to it.

Let’s think about how this happens. Every “system” begins as a response to care. A policy is written because someone fears injustice or disorder. A metric is created because someone worries about waste or decline. A reporting structure emerges because coordination is fragile and failure is costly. These structures are attempts to stabilize patterns of concern under conditions of finitude. Over time, however, the origin of these structures recedes from view. Care crystallizes into durable forms, and those forms take on the appearance of objective reality.

When we forget this origin, the system appears neutral and self-sufficient. When we remember it, we see that what looks like neutrality is the sedimentation of past judgments about what matters.

Every System Is a Human System:

We often speak of “systems” as if they were external mechanisms that we observe from the outside, as if we could diagram them from a neutral vantage point. Yet every “system” is described from somewhere, and every model is drawn from within a field of concern shaped by thrownness and finitude.

Even the aspiration to objectivity is animated by care. The language of efficiency reflects awareness of limited resources. The language of safety reflects recognition of vulnerability. The language of growth reflects anxiety about stagnation or decline. Consider what this means in practice: when we choose to optimize for speed, we are implicitly saying that time matters more than some other dimension. When we prioritize safety, we are acknowledging that harm is possible and unacceptable. These are not neutral technical choices. They are expressions of what we care about.

The great cybernetician Heinz von Foerster emphasized that the observer is never fully separate from the system observed and that descriptions participate in the very processes they describe. He wrote:

The essential contribution of cybernetics to epistemology is the ability to change an open system into a closed system, especially as regards the closing of a linear, open, infinite causal nexus into closed, finite, circular causality.

Systems thinking is therefore circular in structure. We talk and think about “systems” because we care about certain outcomes, and those “systems” subsequently shape what we notice, measure, and prioritize. In this sense, every system is a crystallization of existential orientation. It stabilizes certain cares while marginalizing others, amplifies some signals while attenuating others, and renders some consequences visible while leaving others in shadow. To design a “system” is to formalize a pattern of care under conditions of limitation.

Boundary Judgments and Responsibility:

Boundary judgments, which determine what counts as relevant and what does not, are never merely technical decisions. Every boundary protects something and leaves something exposed. Every inclusion privileges a perspective. Every exclusion renders something less visible.

Consider a simple example: when we define the boundaries of a project, we decide which stakeholders matter, which outcomes we will measure, and which risks we will monitor. These decisions are made by finite beings trying to navigate a world that resists them. Responsibility is not an external addition to design but an acknowledgment that design is already an act of care structured by finitude.

We cannot step outside care in order to build a neutral system. Even indifference distributes concern elsewhere. To say that we do not care about one dimension is to care more about another. The question is never whether care is present. The question is how it is structured, and whose finitude it protects.

Systems Under Existential Exposure:

If every system is a human system, then systems thinking itself must remain exposed to the fragility it seeks to manage. We build structures to stabilize coordination, create procedures to reduce uncertainty, and develop metrics to guide action because without such efforts collective life would fragment. Yet no structure eliminates finitude, no optimization dissolves vulnerability, and no model exhausts the world it seeks to represent. The territory can still resist the map, time can still close possibilities, and loss can still occur.

To remember that every system is a human system is to remember that it rests on the shoulders of beings who were thrown into a scene they did not script and who will one day leave it. We design nonetheless, not because we are omnipotent, but because we care.

Final Words:

Systems thinking is not a technical escape from the human condition; it is one of its expressions. We build “systems” because we are vulnerable, we measure because we can fail, we optimize because resources are limited, and we coordinate because fragmentation threatens what we care about. The temptation is to imagine that better design will eventually free us from exposure, yet exposure is the source of design itself. If we were all-powerful, all-knowing, and immortal, there would be nothing to manage, nothing to protect, and nothing to lose.

We are finite beings improvising within an unfinished play whose beginning we did not witness and whose end we cannot avoid. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus presents the image of a figure condemned to push a stone up a hill only to see it roll back down. He wrote:

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The incline does not disappear and the labor does not end, yet the task is not meaningless. It is lucid engagement with a condition that cannot be abolished. Systems thinking resembles this labor. We redraw boundaries knowing they are provisional, we optimize knowing conditions will shift, and we construct maps knowing the territory exceeds them. Finitude does not dissolve, but neither does care. In choosing to care lucidly and without fantasies of omnipotence, we do not escape the human condition. We inhabit it deliberately and responsibly.

Stay curious and Always keep on learning…

I highly recommend the NLM companion video for this post –
https://youtu.be/lxZcn33-NpM

If you liked what you have read, please consider my book “Second Order Cybernetics,” available in hard copy and e book formats. https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/products/soc-book

Note:

In referencing the work of Martin Heidegger, I want to acknowledge the deeply troubling fact of his affiliation with the Nazi party. This aspect of his life casts a long and painful shadow over his legacy. While I draw on specific philosophical ideas that I find thought-provoking or useful, this is not an endorsement of the man or his actions. Engaging with his work requires ethical vigilance, and I remain mindful of the responsibility to not separate ideas from the broader context in which they were formed.

On Self-Deception in Systems Thinking: A Kierkegaardian Mirror

AI Generated

In today’s post I want to spend time with Søren Kierkegaard. I have been interested in his ideas because he occupies an unusual place in the history of thought. He is considered a pioneer of existentialism, and yet he is also a man of faith. Most of the existentialist thinkers who followed him, including Sartre, built their philosophies around radical freedom and human responsibility without any reference to faith at all. Kierkegaard stands in the middle of this tension. He writes from a position of uncertainty and responsibility, but he also lets faith shape his understanding of what it means to be human. This combination gives his work a kind of depth that is difficult to classify. It also gives us a set of ideas that speak directly to the act of thinking, especially when we try to think in ‘systems’.

Thinking in ‘systems’ is often presented as an attempt to arrange the world into a coherent whole. We are encouraged to draw maps, diagrams, and loops that claim to show how everything is connected. These maps have their value, but they also create the illusion that understanding is a matter of fitting pieces together. They invite us to believe that if we only had the right model, the right picture, or the right mission statement, then clarity would follow. But the thinking domain is not the physical domain. Thoughts are not puzzle pieces, and ideas do not snap together neatly. There is no final picture on the box to guide. There is only the ongoing work of trying to understand a world that will not hold still long enough to be captured by a diagram.

Kierkegaard seems to have understood this difficulty quite well. He believed that the greatest danger in human life is self-deception. We long for the comfort of clarity, so we often rush to declare purposes and principles. For Kierkegaard, becoming a self is not a matter of adopting a slogan. It is a lifelong task shaped by inwardness, responsibility, and the willingness to face ambiguity without trying to escape it. Our authenticity comes from this attempt. This is why he would be deeply suspicious of systems that claim to explain everything. For him such ‘systems’ flatten the complexity of human experience. They offer a kind of intellectual reassurance, but they do not help us live.

One of Kierkegaard’s most striking ideas is that life can be understood only by looking backward, but it must be lived forward. Understanding in this regard is a retrospective act. It is something we do when we look back and discover patterns in what has already happened. But living is always forward. It takes place in a stream of uncertainty, where choices must be made without guarantees and where the meaning of those choices often remains unclear until much later. This observation challenges the entire idea of systemic coherence. Systems maps work backward. They create a picture of causality after the fact. They explain what has been, but they do not show us how to live into what is unfolding. They provide a sense of structure, but this structure is largely retrospective.

This backward–forward tension reveals why the search for a perfectly coherent system is misguided. Human life does not unfold according to a diagram. Thinking does not progress by assembling pieces into a single whole. We understand our experiences only after we have lived through them. The clarity we draw from models and mission statements can therefore be misleading. It can be useful as a reflection, but it should not substitute for the lived experience of confronting ambiguity in the moment. Kierkegaard’s insight makes the entire project of declaring a mission or a golden why feel somewhat naive. These declarations claim to give direction, but direction is not something that can simply be proclaimed. Direction must be discovered through the way we participate in the world.

Another of Kierkegaard’s central ideas is that truth becomes meaningful only when it is appropriated inwardly. Truth is not something imposed from above. It must be taken up, lived, wrestled with, and made one’s own. A beautifully crafted mission statement does not create meaning. A polished systems map does not create understanding. These are only starting points. Understanding arises only when individuals confront their own limitations, their own anxieties, and the tensions that shape their experiences. For Kierkegaard, this inward appropriation is the essence of responsible living. It is also the key to responsible thinking.

Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety deepens this idea. Anxiety is not simply fear. It is the feeling that arises when one realizes one must freely choose. It is the dizziness of possibility. In the context of thinking, anxiety shows up when we face the limits of our understanding, when we recognize that we must choose what matters, and when we realize that there is no system neat enough to relieve us of that responsibility. Many organizational declarations are attempts to soothe this anxiety. They create a picture of direction that allows people to avoid the discomfort of thinking for themselves. But Kierkegaard would say that this discomfort is precisely where thinking begins.

This gives us a different language for cognitive blindness. Blindness is not only a matter of not seeing. It is often a refusal to see, a retreat into the comfort of prefabricated clarity. Thinking asks us to approach our blindness with curiosity rather than defensiveness. It invites us to engage with the friction that reveals what we had overlooked. Systems thinking, when practiced responsibly, is not about drawing neat maps. It is about cultivating the openness required to encounter what does not fit and the humility to revise our sense of the world when confronted with surprise.

Final words:

In the end, Kierkegaard helps us see that thinking is not the work of fitting pieces together. It is the work of becoming a self, which requires inwardness, responsibility, and the willingness to live with ambiguity. He reminds us that life unfolds forward while understanding works backward. This simple observation exposes the limitations of any attempt to impose a coherent system on a world that is always in motion. Mission statements and golden whys can be helpful beginnings, but they often promise clarity without cultivating the character and perception that make clarity meaningful.

The point is not to reject purpose or systemic awareness. It is to hold our purposes lightly, to allow our thinking to be shaped by our experiences, and to accept that ambiguity is not a failure of insight but a condition of life. Systems thinking, when grounded in Kierkegaard’s lessons, becomes a stance rather than a diagram. It becomes a way of approaching the world with patience, honesty, and a readiness to see differently. This path is demanding, but it is also the one that keeps us awake to the depth and complexity of being human.

Stay curious and Always keep on learning…

Minimizing Harm, Maximizing Humanity:

In today’s post, I am looking at a question that is rarely asked in management. What if the most responsible course of action is not to maximize benefit, but to minimize harm? In decision theory, this is expressed as the minimax principle. The idea is that one should minimize the worst possible outcome. In human systems, that outcome is best understood as harm to people, relationships, and the invisible infrastructure that sustains collective work.

The language of management is often dominated by the pursuit of gains. Leaders are taught to ask what is the best that can happen. They are told to optimize, to scale, and to seek advantage. The minimax principle turns this question around. It asks instead what is the worst that can happen and how do we prevent it. Every decision about maximization must be evaluated through the lens of minimizing harm. Harm minimization is not a boundary condition but the primary ethical directive that governs all other management decisions.

Russell Ackoff once observed that the more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. This statement captures the ethical inversion at the heart of many managerial failures. The pursuit of maximum gain often blinds organizations to the quiet forms of loss that accumulate in the background. Human systems depend on tacit networks of trust, communication, and mutual adjustment. When efficiency cuts too deeply, these invisible infrastructures collapse. The system loses its ability to adapt.

To minimize maximum harm is not to resist change. It is not an invitation to stand still. Rather, it is a recognition that progress and ethics operate according to different logics. Progress concerns improvement and expansion. Ethics concerns the protection of dignity, agency, and reversibility. Once we place harm minimization at the center of our decisions, progress becomes sustainable because it no longer depends on exploitation or exclusion.

The primary ethical directive to minimize harm requires a clear operational principle. Heinz von Foerster provided this principle with remarkable clarity- I shall act always so as to increase the number of choices. This is not a secondary value. This is how harm minimization is operationalized.

Consider what happens when choices are available. When options remain open, people retain the capacity to move in different directions. They can experiment, observe the results, and if those results prove harmful or undesirable, they can try a different direction. This is reversibility. It is not that decisions are undone but that people are not locked into a single path with no way out. Reversibility means the system retains the capacity to self-correct. This becomes an integral part of being viable.

When choices are removed, a different logic takes hold. A decision made under constraint, with no alternatives available, becomes irreversible. The person cannot change course because there is no other path to take. The harm accumulates and cannot be addressed through adaptation or choice. This is an important distinction. To minimize harm is to preserve the optionality that allows people to respond when things go wrong. When you increase the number of choices available to people, you prevent harm from becoming locked in place. You maintain the possibility of recovery. You keep open the horizon of possibilities. The person is not left to say I had no choice, which is the expression of the deepest form of harm, the harm from which there is no escape.

This means that every decision about maximization or progress must be evaluated through this lens. Does it increase or decrease the number of choices available to people? Does it preserve reversibility or does it close off futures? Does it prevent irreversible harm or does it create conditions from which recovery is impossible? This is how we operationalize the primary ethical directive in practice.

Werner Ulrich’s Critical Systems Heuristics extends this insight into a framework for reflective practice. Ulrich reminds us that every system boundary includes some and excludes others. Those excluded often bear the consequences of decisions without having had a voice in making them. Ethics therefore requires that we identify who loses in the system we design. Ethics requires that we act in ways that allow their participation and emancipation. To preserve choice is to protect those at the margins of decisions. It is to recognize that moral responsibility lies in how boundaries are drawn. When we ask who loses, we are asking a minimax question. We are asking what is the worst that can happen for those at the margins.

To some, the minimax principle might sound like a cautious philosophy, one that restrains progress. This would be a misunderstanding. The aim is not to prevent change but to cultivate conditions under which change can occur without catastrophic harm. Here the insights of Magoroh Maruyama are valuable. In his work on second cybernetics, he distinguished between negative feedback processes that regulate deviation and positive feedback processes that amplify it. He noted that deviation amplification is the essence of morphogenesis. Not all deviations are errors to be corrected. Some are the sources of new order and innovation. Ethical design therefore should not eliminate deviation but create conditions in which positive deviation can be generative without catastrophic harm. To minimize maximum harm is not the same as to minimize deviation. It is about preserving the space in which positive deviation can arise safely.

Von Foerster’s imperative and Maruyama’s insight converge here. Both point toward the idea that ethics in complex systems must not suppress variety. Von Foerster’s view was that more freedom comes with more responsibility. When we create systems that expand choice, we simultaneously increase the responsibility of those who act within them. The ethical task is not to eliminate risk but to manage it in a way that nurtures diversity and growth while protecting the conditions of future choice. To design ethically is to create the space in which deviation, learning, and emergence can unfold without irreversible harm.

Behind every visible structure of management lies an invisible infrastructure. It consists of relationships, trust, informal knowledge, and the tacit coordination that keeps work alive. This infrastructure is often taken for granted. It is noticed only when it breaks down. In the pursuit of efficiency, organizations frequently erode these invisible supports. Staff reductions, rigid procedures, and mechanistic control can destroy the very human capacities that enable adaptability and resilience. The question therefore is not what can be gained but what can be lost without recovery. True resilience depends on maintaining the conditions that allow the system to heal itself. When we ask this question, we are asking what choices we are removing from people. We are asking what futures we are closing off.

It is important to distinguish ethics from progress. Ethics does not belong to the domain of progress. Progress concerns the expansion of capability. Ethics concerns the preservation of humanity. The two may coexist, but they are not the same. Progress without ethical constraint risks creating conditions from which recovery is impossible. Ethics without openness to change risks paralysis. The minimax principle, interpreted through von Foerster and Ulrich, provides a way to hold both. It calls for action that reduces maximum harm while sustaining the capacity for continued evolution.

Maruyama’s perspective deepens this understanding. By allowing positive deviation, we cultivate the potential for new forms of order. By preserving choice, we protect against harm that would close the future. The task of management therefore is not to optimize the present but to sustain the possibility of better futures without destroying the diversity from which they may emerge.

Ackoff’s view was that the future is not something to be predicted but something to be designed. The ethical responsibility of design is to ensure that this future remains open. To minimize maximum harm is to recognize the fragility of what is human in our systems. To preserve choice is to keep open the horizon of possibility. To embrace positive deviation is to invite emergence without destruction. Ethics in management is not about perfection or certainty. It is about maintaining the delicate balance between care and change.

Final Words:

When compromises are inevitable in human systems, the most humane path is to protect what allows us to begin again. The minimax principle is an invitation to ask different questions in our organizations. It is an invitation to be aware of who loses in the systems we design. It is an invitation to increase the number of choices available to people. It is an invitation to preserve reversibility and to protect the invisible infrastructure that sustains our collective work. We are responsible for our construction of these systems. We are responsible for the futures we foreclose and the futures we keep open. To be an authentic manager is to be aware of this responsibility and to strive, always, to minimize the harm we might do while creating conditions for emergence and learning.

Stay curious and always keep on learning.

Leadership as Condition Creation and Boundary Critique:

Part 2: Boundary Critique and Condition Creation

Refer to my previous post here.

In today’s post, I am exploring following up on what leadership means when we recognize that organizations do not have purposes, but people do. If we cannot simply align everyone to an organizational purpose, what does it mean to lead? How do we create conditions where diverse human purposes can interact productively?

I am drawing on insights from Critical Systems Heuristics, second order cybernetics, and systems thinking. The ideas here continue from my previous post on organizational purpose.

Leaders as Condition Creators Within the System:

If organizations do not have purposes, what does leadership mean? I believe leaders are people who take up the responsibility to create conditions so that desired patterns of behavior and interaction emerge.

But here is the crucial point from second order cybernetics that I find fascinating. Leaders are not neutral architects standing outside the system. They are participants whose own purposes drive their condition-creating. When a leader decides what outcomes are desired, they make that determination based on their own purposefulness, their own constructed sense of what matters.

This creates recursive loops that traditional leadership thinking ignores. I picture this as a spiral of mutual influence. Leaders create conditions based on their purposes. These conditions interact with others’ purposes. The resulting patterns influence what the leader observes as working or failing. This changes the leader’s purposes and their condition-creation. The cycle continues.

I should note that this recursive leadership operates at multiple time scales. Leaders need to maintain day-to-day viability by preserving conditions that allow current purpose interactions to function. This is the frequent work of maintaining operational stability. But they must also monitor whether environmental changes threaten the essential variables that enable people to maintain their purposefulness and adaptive capacity.

When environmental shifts make current conditions unsustainable, leaders need to engage in what Ashby called ultrastable adaptation. For instance, when sudden regulatory changes undermine existing processes, stability requires maintaining day-to-day viability, but adaptation might mean restructuring the whole feedback system. The challenge is knowing when to maintain stability and when adaptation requires breaking and rebuilding the very conditions they have been protecting.

The leader is simultaneously observer and observed, designer and designed. Their responsibility does not come from some organizational mandate. It emerges from their own purposefulness and their relationships with other purposeful people in the system.

This raises critical ethical questions that I find compelling. Given that leaders’ individual purposes inevitably shape condition-creation, how do they prevent their strong personal purposes from overshadowing the genuine emergence of diverse patterns?

From a cybernetic constructivism standpoint, I believe the answer lies in the recursive nature of their role. As they create conditions for others to observe and influence the system, they must also create conditions for others to observe and influence their own condition-creating behavior. The leaders should engage in systematic practices for self-critique. They also need a means for regular feedback loops about how their condition-creating affects others’ viability. They need structured processes for others to question their boundary-drawing decisions.

Aiming for Betterment Through Boundary Critique:

Rather than imposing abstract organizational goals, I see leadership as creating conditions to maximize the viability and flourishing of as many participants as possible. This includes ensuring transparent and just processes for navigating inevitable trade-offs.

I acknowledge the reality that in complex systems with genuinely conflicting purposes, achieving betterment for absolutely everyone may be impossible. Some purposes can prove incompatible. Some trade-offs can disadvantage certain participants. Some conflicts may require difficult choices about whose viability takes priority in specific contexts.

This is where Critical Systems Heuristics becomes essential. I believe the leader’s purpose becomes systematically questioning boundaries and stakeholder perspectives to prevent falling into benevolent paternalism. The focus turns to identifying who is not being served by current arrangements. Whose voices are not being heard? Who are the “losers in the game”?

Instead of “I will identify the losers and make their lives better”, the approach becomes “I will create conditions where people can identify when they are losing and have agency to change that”. This requires ongoing boundary critique. This might involve facilitated reflection sessions where excluded stakeholders name their concerns, or governance mechanisms where power asymmetries are explicitly surfaced.

Questions such as these become essential. Who ought to belong to the system of stakeholders? What ought to be the purpose of the system? Who is not being served by this system? Whose voices are not being heard? But these questions require systematic, repeated processes to prevent them from becoming empty rituals.

When purposes prove genuinely incompatible, I believe the leader’s role is not to force resolution but to create transparent processes for making trade-offs and supporting those whose purposes cannot be accommodated within the current system. This might involve restructuring teams. It might mean creating parallel tracks for different approaches. It could include helping people find more compatible contexts for their purposes, or providing transition support for those who need to leave.

Through this process, what we observe through POSIWID analysis becomes more aligned with supporting individual viability and collective flourishing. This is not because “the system” changes its behavior, but because the patterns of human interaction shift.

Purpose and Profit as Emergent Outcomes:

When conditions support individual recursive viability through ongoing boundary critique, when people can maintain their own purposefulness while engaging productively with others, the patterns of behavior often transcend simple profit maximization. Innovation, resilience, creativity, sustainability, and quality of life all emerge as natural expressions of viable recursive interactions. These become part of what we can observe through POSIWID analysis.

The profit motive does not disappear. It becomes one element in the larger emerging patterns of collective viability that arise from supporting individual viability. Profit becomes a signal that people are creating value that others want to exchange for. But through our refined POSIWID approach we can see it is a lagging indicator of the health of human interactions rather than the primary driver of behavioral patterns.

When we apply POSIWID to this approach, we can observe whether the conditions actually support individual viability and produce emergent collective benefit. Or do they just generate new forms of rhetoric while the same problematic patterns of interaction continue?

The question is not whether to choose profit or purpose. This is a false dichotomy. The question is this – How do we create conditions where human flourishing and value creation emerge together? How do we support people pursuing what matters to them in relationship with others, while systematically questioning who gets to define what flourishing and value mean?

Final Thoughts:

Leadership in this light requires epistemic humility and acceptance of pluralism. This approach exposes the myth of the benevolent paternalistic leader. The leader cannot be all knowing and all powerful. Leadership in complex human systems requires epistemic humility. No single person can understand all the purposes at play or predict how they will interact under different conditions.

Epistemic humility means acknowledging the limits of what any observer can know. When we recognize that our observations are shaped by our own purposes and position, we become more cautious about imposing our view of what is best for others. We focus instead on creating conditions where people can pursue their own definitions of flourishing while engaging constructively with others who have different purposes.

Acceptance of pluralism means recognizing that people legitimately hold different purposes and values. These differences are not problems to be solved but realities to be worked with. The art lies in creating conditions where diverse purposes can interact without requiring false unity or artificial harmony.

I find it meaningful that humans evolved as a species to rely on each other. As Heinz von Foerster observed, “A is better off when B is better off“. This insight from second-order cybernetics points toward creating conditions where mutual viability becomes possible. We should focus on building conditions where we can rely on each other rather than trying to control each other.

A wise leader focuses on minimizing harm first before maximizing benefits. In complex systems with genuinely conflicting purposes, I believe the first priority is ensuring that our condition-creating does not undermine the viability of those we claim to serve. Only then can we work toward enhancing collective capability.

When we work with the actual agency of actual people, guided by epistemic humility and acceptance of pluralism, we discover possibilities for organizing that honor both individual viability and collective capability.

Stay Curious, and Always Keep on Learning…

Rethinking Purpose: When Organizations Stop Having and People Start Being…

Part 1: The Reification Trap and What We Actually Observe

In today’s post, I am looking at the notion of organizational purposes in light of cybernetic constructivism. The ideas here are inspired by giants like Stafford Beer, Spencer Brown, Ralph Stacey, Werner Ulrich, Russell Ackoff and Erik Hollnagel.

The corporate world seems to be obsessed with organizational purpose. Mission statements adorn lobby walls. Consultants make fortunes helping executives discover their organization’s deeper calling, their “why”.

From a cybernetic constructivist perspective, this entire enterprise rests on a philosophical error. This is the notion that organizations have purposes. Organizations do not have purposes, people do.

Organizations are certainly created with specific objectives and goals in mind. For example, a company can be formed to develop software or a charity established to alleviate poverty. But the idea that these entities themselves possess purposes is what philosophers call reification, treating an abstraction as if it were a concrete thing.

Organizations have goals and objectives set by their founders or governing bodies. But purposes, the deeper sense of meaning and direction that drives behavior, belong to individuals. This distinction is crucial for understanding emergence in an organizational setting.

This is not semantic nitpicking. It is a fundamental reframe that helps us rethink how we understand organizational behavior and human experience within systems.

The Reification Trap and POSIWID:

When we say something like “our company’s purpose is to make the world more sustainable”, we commit reification. We treat an abstraction as if it were a concrete thing. Organizations are viewed wrongly as entities with intentions, values, and purposes of their own.

What organizations actually have are stated goals and objectives, declarations about what they aim to achieve. But when we strip away this corporate fiction, what remains is people. People with their own purposes, their own sense-making processes, their own constructed meanings about what matters and why.

Stafford Beer’s insight that “the purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID) helps us cut through the fog of stated intentions and mission statements. But when we think about what we have been saying so far, we can see that the idea of POSIWID itself could be a reification trap. In criticizing the reification of organizational purpose using POSIWID, we risk reifying “the system” itself as something that “does” things.

A way to ease out of this apparent trap is to use Wittgenstein’s Ladder. POSIWID serves as a cognitive aid helping us climb to better understanding, which we then discard.

What we actually observe are patterns of human behavior and interaction. When we say “the system produces data harvesting behaviors”, we mean “we observe people engaging in data harvesting activities within particular structural contexts”. When we say “the system undermines individual viability”, we mean “we observe interactions between people that result in reduced individual flourishing”.

The value of POSIWID lies not in discovering what systems “really want” but in training our attention on emergent patterns of human behavior rather than declared organizational intentions. Once this shift in attention is accomplished, we can discard the system-as-actor metaphor and focus on the actual phenomenon. People with purposes interacting within conditions that constrain and enable certain patterns of behavior.

Applied to organizations, this refined principle becomes this. If we want to understand what is actually happening, we should observe the patterns of behavior and interaction that emerge from people’s purposes within particular conditions, not focus on declared organizational goals.

Patterns of Purpose Interaction:

From a cybernetic constructivist perspective, what we observe are patterns emerging from the interactions of individual purposes within structured contexts. When a software engineer’s purpose to solve elegant problems intersects with a marketer’s purpose to help people discover useful tools, and both operate within structures that reward customer satisfaction, we observe certain patterns of behavior and outcomes.

These patterns are dynamic, not fixed. As people’s individual purposes evolve, as new people join the system, as external conditions shift, the observable patterns shift too. The patterns become a living expression of ongoing purpose interactions rather than a static implementation of declared intentions.

But here’s the crucial insight from cybernetics. The observer is part of the system being observed. When we observe patterns of organizational behavior, we are not neutral external scientists. We are participants whose own purposes and perspectives shape what we see. This creates recursive loops that traditional management thinking often ignores.

The manager who observes that “people are not motivated” and implements new programs is not a neutral observer. They are a participant whose own purposes drive their observation and choice of interventions. These interventions then become part of the conditions within which other people’s purposes interact, potentially changing the very patterns the manager was trying to understand.

The refined POSIWID insight helps us see that if we want to change observable patterns, we need to understand and work with the actual purposes of the actual people involved, not impose new mission statements or organizational goals from above.

From Alignment to Resonance:

Traditional thinking seeks alignment, getting everyone pointed in the same direction toward the same stated organizational goals. But our refined understanding shows us that there is no collective entity that can choose a unified direction. In reality, there are only individuals with purposes engaging in ongoing interactions.

Some of these interactions create resonance, patterns where individual purposes amplify and support each other in ways that produce coherent behavioral patterns. Others create tension or conflict. The software engineer’s elegant problem-solving and the marketer’s user advocacy can resonate productively, creating emergent value. But this coherent behavior is not orchestrated by some collective consciousness. It emerges from how these specific people with these specific purposes interact within particular conditions.

What we observe are the behavioral patterns emerging from these ongoing purpose-interactions, not something chosen by “the organization.” Even when there are formal decision-making processes, you still have individual people making individual choices about whether to participate, how to contribute, what to support.

Understanding Recursive Viability:

When we talk about recursive systems, we mean something different from linear processes. In recursive systems, each loop is independently viable. Each person constructs their own purposes, observes their own interactions, and maintains their own capacity to adapt and respond. They are not merely components serving the larger system. They are complete systems in themselves.

People observe the patterns of interaction, including their own participation in those patterns. This observation changes how they construct their purposes, which changes their interactions, which changes the patterns, which changes what they observe. Each person completes this cycle independently while also participating in the larger patterns.

The viability of observable patterns emerges from the viability of individual participants, rather than being imposed upon them. When individual people can maintain their own purposefulness and adaptive responses, the larger patterns that emerge tend to be more resilient and creative.

Instead of asking “how do we get people to serve the organization’s purpose”, we ask “how do we create conditions where each person’s independent viability contributes to emerging patterns that enhance collective viability?”

Collective viability is not itself an entity or fixed goal. It is an emergent, dynamic pattern arising from the interactions of individual viable systems. It shifts as individual purposes evolve, as new people join the system, as conditions change.

Quality of Life and Practical Implications:

Quality of life is not something organizations provide to employees like a benefit package. It is something individuals construct through their lived experience of pursuing their purposes within particular conditions. But quality of life is both an input and output of the system. When people experience high quality of life, they bring different energy and capability to their interactions.

This reframe has practical implications. If we want to change observable patterns of behavior, we need to understand and work with the actual purposes of the actual people involved. What do people actually care about? How do their purposes complement or conflict? What conditions support the expression of these purposes?

Sustainable change happens through shifts in the interaction of purposes, not through compliance with new directives. People adapt their behavior when conditions change in ways that better enable them to pursue what they already care about, or when they develop new purposes through their lived experience of interaction with others.

Final Words:

Let go of the fiction that your organization has a purpose. Instead, get curious about the actual purposes of the actual people involved and observe the patterns of behavior that emerge through POSIWID analysis. What do they care about? How do their purposes interact? What behavioral patterns emerge from these interactions?

Then, experiment with conditions. What structures and processes support the kinds of interactions that produce the behavioral patterns you want to see more of? Pay attention to emergence while remaining aware of your position as observer. Use POSIWID as your reality check. If the observable patterns do not match the stated intentions, look to the interaction of individual purposes within current conditions for explanation.

This shift from organizational purposes to human purposes is not merely theoretical. It is practical. When we stop pretending that abstractions have agency and start working with the actual agency of actual people, we discover possibilities for organizing that honor both individual viability and collective capability.

In the next post, we will explore what this means for leadership as condition creation, boundary critique, and the challenge of supporting diverse purposes within structured contexts.

I will finish this post with a quote from Ralph Stacey:
There is no possibility of standing outside human interaction to design a program for it since we are all participants in that interaction.

Stay curious and always keep on learning…

The Ethics of Choice: Ackoff Meets von Foerster

In today’s post I am exploring the need for ethics in Systems Thinking using the ideas of Heinz von Foerster and Russell Ackoff. Russell Ackoff and Heinz von Foerster came from different traditions within systems thinking. Ackoff comes from operations research and organizational design, and von Foerster comes from physics and second-order cybernetics. Yet, in their mature work, they both arrived at a strikingly similar ethical stance: that “systems” ought to be structured in ways that expand the capacity of their parts to choose, act, and develop.

Von Foerster’s ethical imperative is deceptively simple: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices“. It is easy to misread this as a general appeal to openness, ambiguity, or liberal tolerance. But that would miss its depth. For von Foerster, the notion of “choices” is rooted in constructivism. We are not passive recipients of a pre-given world. We are active participants in the construction of our realities. Therefore, every action we take contributes to shaping the world that others, too, will inhabit.

I have written about my corollary to Heinz von Foerster’s ethical imperative before: always opt for situations that preserve and expand future possibilities.

To increase the number of choices is not merely to keep options open. It is to take responsibility for the kind of world we are helping bring into being. It is to recognize that our models, narratives, and designs are not neutral. They create constraints or possibilities. The ethical dimension emerges from this constructivist insight. If we are the ones constructing meaning and order, then we are also responsible for ensuring that others can participate in that construction.

Russell Ackoff, coming from a different intellectual lineage, spoke in similar terms about purposeful systems. In his view, a social system, unlike a machine or an organism, is composed of parts that have purposes of their own. This is not just a descriptive claim. It is a normative one. To treat an enterprise as a social system is to treat its people as agents. That means enabling them to select both ends and means relevant to them. It means expanding the variety of behaviors available to the parts of the system. And it means refusing to reduce individuals to roles, procedures, or interchangeable units.

As Ackoff said: [1]

An enterprise conceptualized as a social system should serve the purposes of both its parts and the system of which it is a part. It should enable its parts and its containing systems to do things they could not otherwise do. They enable their parts to participate directly or indirectly in the selection of both ends and means that are relevant to them. This means that enterprises conceptualized as social systems increase the variety of both the means and ends available to their parts, and this, in turn, increases the variety of behavior available to them.

Ackoff does not describe freedom in abstract terms. Instead, he frames it in terms of viable behavior. If systems are to be purposeful and adaptive, they must support the ability of their parts to choose and act. This is not a luxury. It is an imperative in turbulent environments. Ackoff continues:

The parts of a completely democratic system must be capable of more than reactive or responsive behavior. They must be able to act. Active behavior is behavior for which no other event is either necessary or sufficient. Acts, therefore, are completely self-determined, the result of choice. Choice is essential for purposeful behavior. Therefore, if the parts of a system are to be treated as purposeful, they must be given the freedom to choose, to act.

This parallels von Foerster’s call to increase choices. It also deepens it. Ackoff is not only speaking of choice as a moral principle. He is showing that without choice, systems cannot act purposefully. They can only react. In complex systems, where change is constant, such reactivity is insufficient.

Though Ackoff and von Foerster rarely cited one another, their parallel conclusions suggest a convergence shaped by a shared moral sensitivity to the role of agency in system design.

Von Foerster’s imperative finds its most serious grounding in historical trauma. His insistence on the responsibility of the observer was not theoretical. He lived through the Nazi era when many claimed they “had no choice”. His ethical imperative arose in opposition to this very notion. The idea that one was simply “following orders” was, to him, a denial of personhood. To say “I had no choice” is not merely an evasion. It is a collapse of moral responsibility. It turns the observer into an automaton and ethics into compliance.

Ackoff, like von Foerster, saw how ethical collapse begins when systems are designed to remove agency under the guise of order. When systems are designed to remove or suppress choice, they not only become unethical but also incapable of long-term success. The suppression of choice results in stagnation, in the inability to deal with novelty, and in the eventual failure to match the variety of the environment.

As he explained:

Enterprises conceptualized and managed as social systems, and their parts, can respond to the unpredictable changes inherent in turbulent environments and can deal effectively with increasing complexity. They can expand the variety of their behavior to match or exceed the variety of the behavior of their environments because of the freedom of choice that pervades them. They are capable not only of rapid and effective passive adaptation to change but also of active adaptation. They can innovate by perceiving and exploiting opportunities for change that are internally, not externally, stimulated.

This ability to innovate from within is exactly what von Foerster meant by ethical action. It is not enough to survive. We must be able to imagine alternatives, to create futures. That can happen only when participants are seen as observers and constructors, not as passive components.

Ackoff takes this one step further by reminding us that systems have multiple levels of purpose.

The social-systemic view of an enterprise is based on considering three ‘levels’ of purpose: the purposes of the larger system of which an enterprise is a part, the purposes of the enterprise itself, and the purposes of its parts.

The ethical task is not to enforce alignment but to cultivate conditions where these levels support and enhance one another. That means making space for new forms of participation. It means resisting the urge to simplify or to eliminate tensions.

Both thinkers were concerned with the future. Ackoff warned:

Today, however, we frequently make decisions that reduce the range of choices that will be available to those who will occupy the future.

For example, future options are significantly reduced by destruction and pollution of our physical environment, extinction of species of plants and animals, and exhaustion of limited natural resources. War – perhaps the most destructive of human activities – removes some or all future options for many. We have no right to deprive future generations of the things they might need or desire, however much we may need or desire them.

Here again, von Foerster would agree. The responsibility of the observer extends through time. Ethics is primarily oriented toward the future. To act ethically is to preserve and enlarge the set of future choices, not just present ones.

This is the intersection between Ackoff and von Foerster. It is not primarily about designing for freedom, as Stafford Beer might have framed it, but about cultivating the ethical awareness that we are always shaping what freedom becomes. Ethical systems are not those that impose order from above. They are those that create the conditions for others to choose, to act, and to become.

To act ethically, then, is to act in a way that enlarges the scope of agency around us. It is to refuse the claim that “there was no other way.” It is to question not only the actions of individuals but also the design of systems that make those actions seem inevitable. Von Foerster challenges us to build systems that do not foreclose choice but rather multiply it. Ackoff challenges us to design organizations in which people can act with purpose, both their own and that of the larger system.

The convergence of these two thinkers gives us a powerful way to think about ethics in complexity. It is not about controlling outcomes. It is about enabling emergence. It is not about defending what is. It is about creating the conditions for what could be.

What is common between them is not method, but ethos. They both believed that how we think about systems shapes how we act within them. And how we act, in turn, shapes what becomes possible for others. In a world increasingly constrained by the consequences of past decisions, we must always opt for situations that preserve and expand future possibilities.

Final Words:

Heinz von Foerster knew too well the cost of systems that suppress choice. His ethical imperative was not a poetic suggestion but a moral demand born from lived experience. For him, the statement “I had no choice” was a warning sign. It was a marker of ethical blindness. To live ethically, he believed, was to remain aware that we are always constructing reality, whether we recognize it or not.

Ethics, then, is not a separate layer added to action. It is embedded in every decision, every design, every interpretation. By increasing the number of choices for others, we resist systems that close down alternatives and silence difference. We push back against the machinery of obedience. We make space for novelty, for learning, and for the dignity of self-determined action.

Von Foerster did not ask us to design perfect “systems”. He asked us to remain awake to our role within them. To be a responsible observer is to see how our ways of seeing shape what is possible. That is the ethical task he left us. Not to necessarily control the future, but to leave it open.

I will finish with a very wise quote from Ackoff:

The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become.

Always keep learning…

[1] The Democratic Corporation, Russell L. Ackoff (1994)

When is a ‘System’?

In today’s post, I would like to explore the question, “When is a system?” and reflect on how cybernetics invites us to think differently about systems. This shift in phrasing may seem minor, but it opens up a deeper understanding of what we are truly doing when we speak of systems.

The Cybernetic Shift:

Cybernetics offers a different path. Rather than asking, “What is a system?”, it invites us to ask, “When is a system?” As a student of Cybernetics, I came across Herbert Brün’s question, “When is Cybernetics?”. He was challenging the obsession with an observer devoid pursuit of knowledge. When we ask “What is..” questions, we are focusing on reification. As Paul Pangaro notes[1]:

Let me show this by first asking the question, ‘What is a rock?’ The question as phrased and by its nature implies that rocks exist and that they can be known and defined. This existence stands on its own to such an extent that an answer can be given, ‘A rock is — dot dot dot’; and this description is given as independent of time, context, and observer. The act of providing an answer is to buy into the position that there is a reality that can be expressed in this independence.

Of course the reality is in one sense in the description, not any ‘object itself.’ We do invest in the description as a thing, an ‘objectification’ that exists on its own, which is what we call knowledge. The contribution of personal experience is lost or elided. What is left is the dead description, devoid of a maker and the context and purpose in which it is made.

This change in perspective alters everything. It reminds us that systems are not found in the world as pre-existing objects. They are drawn into being. They do not exist without a point of view, without a purpose, and without a participant. A system is not discovered; it is declared. It does not precede our involvement. Instead, it arises with it.

Consider a simple example: When is healthcare a system? For a hospital administrator, healthcare becomes a system when she tracks patient flow, bed occupancy, and discharge rates. For a public health researcher, healthcare becomes a system when he maps disease patterns, social determinants, and community interventions. For a patient with chronic illness, it becomes a system when they navigate insurance approvals, specialist referrals, and medication management. The same collection of clinics, professionals, and treatments becomes different systems depending on who is looking and why.

Beyond Fixed Definitions:

In this way, cybernetics is not about systems as fixed or definable things. It is about how we observe, how we construct, and how we participate in interrelated processes. As Paul Pangaro explained, the “What is …?” question leads us into traps. When we ask “What is a rock?” we imply that rocks exist independently and can be known and defined outside of time, context, and observer. This creates a “dead description, devoid of a maker and the context and purpose in which it is made.” The act of asking “What is…?” itself creates an investment in notions of absolute reality that cybernetics seeks to question.

Cybernetics is better understood as a way of thinking rather than a field of things. Herbert Brün’s insight, substitute “When is…?” for “What is…?”, captures the essence of the cybernetic act: taking an apparent absolute and providing necessities for taking it as a relative. This shift makes the relativity of knowing explicit, relativity that exists as a function of ever different contexts: time, the observer, purpose. Cybernetics draws our attention to the fact that observation changes what is observed. Descriptions are never neutral. They arise from somewhere and from someone. Meaning does not reside in isolation. It arises through interaction.

The Moment of System-Drawing:

This is why the question “When is a system?” is important. It makes visible the choices we make when we describe a situation as systemic. It pushes us to be aware of our own cognitive blind spots and promotes epistemic humility. It reminds us that the context, including who is asking, when, and for what purpose, decisively shapes what we call “the system.”

As Herbert Brün emphasized:[1]

The by far most important, most significant context, overriding in power every other[,] even ever[-]so-blatantly[-]perceivable context, the context decisive in the beginning and in the end, in the speaker and in the receiver, the context which gives its meaning to a statement, the context in which a statement is most undebatably made, is that context which we call “The person who makes the statement.” And let the period after the quotation mark be legal. For to be quoted is not my statement but “The person who makes the statement” and the context he is, not I make.

Systems come into being when we draw boundaries. They begin to make sense when we ask certain questions. They become stable or unstable, depending on who is involved and what they are trying to do.

This insight was central to the work of C. West Churchman, who reminded us that the systems approach begins when one is open to see the world through another’s eyes. This does not mean agreement. It means recognizing that what we call “the system” already reflects a point of view. What seems essential to me may seem irrelevant to you. What I include, you may exclude.

We are recognizing the observer dependent quality of systems, noting that different observers of the same phenomena might conceptualize them into different systems entirely. For one person, a transportation system may refer to trains, roads, and schedules: the physical infrastructure that moves people from point A to point B. For another, it may refer to access, fairness, and opportunity: who can get where, when, and at what cost. For yet another, it may mean emissions, energy use, and ecological impact. “The” system is not one thing. It is always many, depending on how one looks.

The Ethical Dimension:

This orientation opens an ethical space. Cybernetics, epecially second order cybernetics, teaches us that we do not stand outside the world we describe. We bring forth a world through our living, through our speaking, and through our caring. Werner Ulrich took this further by asking us to consider who gets excluded when a system is drawn. The question is not only “What is the system?” or “When is the system?” It is also “Who decides?” and “Who is left out?”

When a city planning department draws the boundaries of a “transportation system” around roads and parking meters, they may inadvertently exclude sidewalks, bike lanes, and public transit, effectively marginalizing pedestrians, cyclists, and those who cannot afford cars. When a hospital defines its “patient care system” in terms of clinical procedures and bed management, it might exclude the experiences of family members, community health workers, or the social determinants that brought patients there in the first place.

To declare a system is to draw a boundary. To draw a boundary is to make a choice. With that choice comes responsibility. Cybernetics is not simply a science of regulation or control. It is a reflection on participation and perspective. It is a reminder that the observer is always part of what is observed.

Final Words:

So when is a system?

A system is whenever someone chooses to see one. It is when relationships are noticed, when patterns are made meaningful, when intentions begin to shape perception. It is not a thing in the world. It is an event in understanding.

To speak of systems, then, is to accept the weight of that declaration. It is to notice that every system includes and excludes. It frames some possibilities and hides others. Cybernetics does not eliminate this fact. It simply asks us to be honest about it.

This awareness changes how we approach systems work. Instead of searching for the “right” system, we might ask: What system-drawing serves our purposes? Whose perspectives are we including or excluding? What becomes visible when we draw the boundaries here rather than there? How might our system-drawing empower or marginalize different groups?

We may never define a system in final terms. But we can choose to be thoughtful in how and when we draw them. We can remain attentive to the ethical and practical consequences of those drawings. And we can remember that every system boundary is a hypothesis about what matters, one that can be questioned, revised, and redrawn as our understanding deepens.

I will finish with a quote from West Churchman that provides further food for thought:

The problem of systems improvement is the problem of the ‘ethics of the whole system’.

Always keep learning…

[1] New Order from Old: The Rise of Second-Order Cybernetics and Implications for Machine Intelligence. A Play in 25 Turns – Paul Pangaro, 1988

Get a Grip on It:

Complexity is a matter of degree and not a kind. – Glenda Eoyang

In today’s post, I am exploring the importance of incorporating diversity when navigating complex environments. I have written previously about the seductive appeal of efficiency and how its blind pursuit can leave us exposed. Efficiency asks us to optimize for known outcomes. It assumes a world where inputs are controlled and variation is minimized. But reality is rarely that generous. It is textured, layered, and in motion. It offers few clean edges and rarely repeats itself in neat loops. As leaders, we are asked to shape structures that can stay viable in this kind of world. The overuse of efficiency in such contexts does not make us leaner or smarter—it often makes us brittle.

We often design as though the ground is level. As if everyone begins from the same place, with the same tools, the same reach, the same slack. But the ground is not level. It has never been. Some people begin with more; more access, more time, more tolerance from the structure. Others begin already contending with friction. Not because they lack capability, but because the design was not shaped with them in mind. This is not just an ethical issue. It is a design one.

In complexity, uniformity fails fast. In simple, symbolic systems—code, logic, procedures—uniformity can be a virtue. The terrain is controlled. The inputs are known. The environment is stable enough to reward sameness. But in complexity—where causes are fuzzy, signals are noisy, and context moves mid-sentence—we need something else. We need grip.

Reality Requires Grip

Reality rarely presents itself in tidy ways. It offers no singular handle for us to grab. Instead, it throws contradictions, mismatched signals, and unexpected constraints. We cannot hold it with one kind of mind, one kind of framework, or one kind of experience. The more varied the terrain, the more varied our grasp must be.

That grip—our capacity to make meaningful contact with complexity—comes from difference. It comes from a range of perspectives, a mix of sensibilities, a spread of lived experiences. It comes from people who notice different things, who ask different questions, who move through the world in different ways. This does come with a cost. Uniform structures may look clean and run fast, but they tend to crack under pressure. Diverse structures take longer to build, but they flex, adapt, and hold when things shift.

Ross Ashby reminded us that only variety can absorb variety. If the environment can surprise us in a hundred ways, then our ‘systems’ must be able to respond in at least a hundred ways. If not, the environment ‘wins’.

We often treat diversity as an accessory, something to be added after the main frame is in place. But in complexity, diversity is not decorative. It becomes load-bearing. The differences give the structure grip, not inward but outward, allowing it to hold against the irregularities of reality. They create structural tension and enable edge awareness. This awareness helps us notice early signals, those subtle cues that something is shifting. The presence of difference prevents the system from becoming complacent, blind, or brittle. Diversity introduces stretch that resists premature closure, while expanding the system’s capacity to perceive what is happening at its limits, where breakdowns often tend to begin.

A monoculture in nature may appear efficient. For example, fields of identical crops may offer predictability, ease of control, and optimized yield when conditions remain stable. But this sameness introduces a hidden fragility. A single disease, an unexpected frost, or a sudden shift in climate can cause the entire network to fail, because uniformity amplifies vulnerability. In contrast, a wild field may seem chaotic or inefficient, yet its diversity in root structures, growth patterns, and tolerances create resilience. When conditions change, not everything is affected in the same way. Some parts fail, while others adapt. The ‘system’ bends, but it does not break.

This is more than an ecological insight. It is a way of thinking about how we organize and sustain ourselves. When a team, a community, or a structure relies on sameness, it may function smoothly in predictable conditions, but it lacks the range to respond when reality becomes more complex. Diversity—cognitive, experiential, and demographic—broadens a group’s capacity to interpret change, adjust course, and stay viable over time. In environments where uncertainty is the rule and control is limited, it is this range that gives the whole arrangement a better grip on reality.

Designing From the Blind Spot

We tend to build from what is visible, measurable, and familiar. We optimize for what is easy to test. But what gets left out often matters more than what gets built in. And too often, the people left out are the ones already carrying the most structural friction. We tend to think of inclusion as a moral gesture. A choice to be kind or fair. When we design only for those already well-positioned, we do not just exclude, we weaken the design itself.

We create brittle solutions, ones that quietly assume access, literacy, capacity, forgiveness. We optimize for efficiency and familiarity, and miss the parts that strain under real-world pressure. But when we start from the edges—from those who live with constraint—we see what the structure hides. We start to notice the steps that are too steep, and that the protocols assume too much. Fixing for them is not just being humane. It becomes diagnostic work. It is how we surface the assumptions that compromise integrity. It is how we build arrangements that do not crack when things get uneven, which they always do.

Final Words

Heinz v on Foerster said:

Act always so as to increase the number of choices.

Maybe the corollary to that is:

Design as if you might be the one with the least choice.

That is not a political statement. It is a practical one. When we build for those with the least slack, we tend to uncover the most insight. And when we design from the blind spot, we do not just fill a gap—we often strengthen the whole. Designing for the most vulnerable builds in the redundancy that makes a structure resilient. When you build in space for the person who cannot read the form, who does not have time to wait, who misses the signal the first time—we are not just helping them. We are making the whole arrangement more resilient.

This is because the real world is not clean. Things fail, contexts shift and people miss a step. And if our design cannot bend in those moments, it will break.

In complex arrangements, redundancy is what keeps the structure whole. Not all paths will be smooth. Not all users will match the ideal profile. Not all steps will land perfectly the first time. This means that we should build space for detours, retries, and second chances. That is not inefficiency. That is how we build resilience. Redundancy is not the opposite of elegance or efficiency. It is the thing that lets the design bend without breaking.

I will finish with one of my favorite quotes from Doctor Who:

Human progress is not measured by industry. It is measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value. That is what defines an age, that is… what defines a species.

Always keep learning…

When Cybernetics Replaced Philosophy – Heideggerian Insights into Systems Thinking – Part 3:

SPIEGEL: And what now takes the place of philosophy?

Heidegger: Cybernetics. [1]

In today’s post, I am wrapping up the series of posts on the Heideggerian insights by tying his later ideas with Cybernetics. You can view my earlier posts here and here.

Heidegger realized that the reliance of modern times on technology is leading humanity away from thinking itself. He went on to say that cybernetics has replaced philosophy. Cybernetics, particularly in its early days (first-order cybernetics), proposed the idea that the world could be understood and controlled through feedback loops, systems, and control mechanisms. This approach brought about the view that systems could be analyzed and optimized by focusing on information flow, communication, and control.

For Heidegger, this shift was significant because it represented a transformation from philosophical reflection on being to technological thinking that prioritizes efficiency, control, and calculation. The concern was that cybernetics, as a science and as a philosophy of systems, would replace the deeper, reflective inquiry into human existence, nature, and being. Instead of focusing on the questions of meaning, existence, and our relationship to the world, cybernetics focuses on problem-solving, control, and optimization.

Cybernetics and the “Standing-Reserve”

Heidegger’s main critique of technology is that it reduces everything (nature, people, even time itself) to a “standing-reserve” (Bestand), something to be used, optimized, and controlled. Cybernetics (especially first order cybernetics), as a way of organizing systems (whether biological, mechanical, or social), fits perfectly into this framing.

In this context, cybernetics offers a model of system control, where everything is measured, processed, and optimized. Heidegger feared that this would become the dominant worldview, replacing the deeper ontological reflections of philosophy with purely functional, instrumental thinking. The philosophical inquiry into what it means ‘to-be’ would be overshadowed by the technological mindset, where the world is treated not as a place for human reflection but as a set of interlocking systems to be controlled. It has become quite normal to consider humans as resources. It would be abnormal to not have a human resources department in any organization.

Heidegger believed that the core of philosophy, especially in the existential tradition, was to ask questions about being, meaning, and human existence. It was about understanding the world in a way that was not reducible to mere calculations or control. Cybernetics, in his view, represents a shift towards quantitative, calculative thinking that bypasses deeper reflections on human existence. When Heidegger says that cybernetics could replace philosophy, he warns that the dominant mode of thought in the future might be one that prioritizes instrumental control over reflection. By doing this, we are reducing human life to a set of inputs and outputs rather than exploring the more profound questions of existence and meaning.

Philosophy’s traditional role, the search for wisdom, would be replaced by functional, managerial thinking: “How do we optimize? How do we stabilize systems? How do we predict outcomes?” In that world, humans themselves risk becoming just another kind of standing-reserve, resources to be managed, data points in systems, not beings questioning their existence. This brings in questions about ethical thinking that is rarely considered in terms of managerial thinking. Here is where second order cybernetics comes into play. Second order cybernetics aligns very well with the later ideas of Heidegger.

The World as a Picture

Heidegger argues that modernity transforms the world into a representable object: a picture that stands before a human subject.

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.[2]

This transformation does not just add new tools; it redefines what the world is. Everything becomes a resource, available for control and calculation. Cybernetics, particularly in its first order form, mirrors this tendency. It maps systems, constructs models, and aims for control. But second order cybernetics, which emerged in the 1970s, turns inward, asking: “Who is doing the observing? What does it mean to know?”

Second order cybernetics, shaped by thinkers like Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana, breaks from the God’s-eye view. The observer is no longer external to the system. They are part of it. Observation itself becomes an action, a construction, an intervention. We are not out there looking into a pre-given world; rather, we are disclosing the world through care, through being-in-the-world. Knowledge, then, is not correspondence but involvement. It is not about having a picture in the head, but about being attuned to a situation, about knowing how to go on in the world.

We do not navigate life by carrying internal maps. We act skillfully because we are already attuned to the world, through our bodily presence and history of engagement. We are always already involved in what we observe. There is no “view from nowhere”.

Von Foerster – The Map Is All We Have

Von Foerster sharpened this critique of representation when he said, “The map is all we have”. This was a nod to Alfred Korzybski’s famous dictum – “the map is not the territory”. von Foerster goes further with this and says that there is no access to the territory outside of our mappings. However, this does not imply that we carry mental blueprints.

Instead, cognition is about structural coupling. When a system is perturbed by its environment and it responds according to its structure and its history of past interactions. This knowledge did not arise from accurate representation, but from historically tuned participation. We are bringing forth a world through interaction, not mirroring it.

This is also why von Foerster said: “If you want to see, learn how to act”. Understanding emerges from doing. Seeing is not prior to action. It is shaped by how we move, respond, and care. Like Heidegger’s hammer that is ready-to-hand, our understanding is practical, not theoretical. The “map” then is a trace of engagement, not a neutral diagram or mental map. This brings up the keen ethical insight of constructivism – we are responsible for the worlds we bring forth. There is no neutral observation, only involvement. We do not just see; we enact distinctions, and those choices matter.

How to Proceed?

Heidegger’s answer to technological enframing is releasement (Gelassenheit). This is not withdrawal but a posture of openness—a “letting-be” of beings. It is both a refusal to dominate and a readiness to engage differently.

Releasement echoes the ethic of second order cybernetics – a recognition that control is never total, that knowing is always situated, and that ‘systems’ are too rich to be fully grasped. It is a call to humility, responsibility, and care. We do not stand apart from the world, looking at it as if it is just “out there” and complete, just waiting to be ‘represented’ in our minds. Instead, we bring forth the world through our involvement, through practical activity, care, concerns and relationships.

When we place Heidegger and second order cybernetics side by side, a powerful ethical sensibility emerges that is often missing from modern managerial thinking. We should act as an observer who matters. Our observations shape what becomes real. We must opt for situations where future possibilities are protected. Freedom is about future possibilities. We must resist the reduction of everything to resources. We must balance calculative and meditative thinking. Cybernetics may offer powerful tools, but it must be nested within deeper questions of meaning. We should learn to dwell and not to dominate. Our task is not to master the world but to participate wisely in it.

Final Words:

In his 1966 Der Spiegel interview [1] (published posthumously), Heidegger made his famous statement:

Only a god can save us.

He was not advocating that we should pray for divine intervention. He was imploring us to realize that we need a fundamental shift in how we think, see, and act. And perhaps second order cybernetics, rightly understood, can help us return to that question. Treating the world as picture blinds us to other modes of revealing—poetic, responsive, ethical. Second order cybernetics, in turn, reminds us that every act of observation is also an act of construction. This reframes truth, not as correspondence, but as coherence within a relational, historical process. Meaning arises from engagement, not representation. We ultimately bear responsibility for how the world comes into view. Both Heidegger and cybernetics are inviting us to move beyond prediction and control—toward participation, humility, and care.

Always keep learning…

[1] “Only a God Can Save Us”: The Spiegel Interview (1966)

[2] The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, M. Heidegger, translated by William Lovitt, 1977.

Note:

In referencing the work of Martin Heidegger, I want to acknowledge the deeply troubling fact of his affiliation with the Nazi party. This aspect of his life casts a long and painful shadow over his legacy. While I draw on specific philosophical ideas that I find thought-provoking or useful, this is not an endorsement of the man or his actions. Engaging with his work requires ethical vigilance, and I remain mindful of the responsibility to not separate ideas from the broader context in which they were formed.